-----Original Message----- From: Steven Hildreth

If used properly Portage is very powerful and works very well.

Therein lies the rub. It is not all that trivial to make it and keep it working properly. Especially if you go trying to run certain specific apps or when you have one app that gets removed from the portage list. I've had portage break on me several times, but maybe I'm loading unusual apps, or they've improved portage. Not that portage isn't a great package management utility. It's far far better than rpm. But you still have to compile everything. In the time it take you to run one portage, I can run a dozen apt-get update && apt-get upgrades, given equivalent systems and not off-loading the compiles to a compile-farm.

Don't get me wrong, I like gentoo. I just think that debian is the easiest and most stable methods of running Linux and keeping it up to date. The only thing that would be better is tweaked debian the way SuSE, Mandrake and RH tweak the kernel and other code to run better. Most of those tweaks find their way back into the community, but not necessarily all.

Brian D.